We're going to break out of our usual parlance of ogres, wizards, and epic battles to talk about a really important topic: the importance of having an open internet, how it is threatened, what CodeCombat is doing to preserve it, and how you can help.

Why we need an open internet

Having a truly open and neutral internet is vital, especially to education. Having an open internet means:

people can access any educational resources as fast as any other resources, no matter where they are, who provides them, how bandwidth heavy they are, or whether they’re on their phone or computer.

people with new ideas about teaching can educate the world with no artificial barriers to entry.

service providers don’t get to decide which educational content gets delivered fast or slow depending on who they've struck deals with.

We firmly believe that the future of humanity and the world economy depends heavily upon education, and I believe that the future of education depends heavily upon having an open and neutral internet.

Why the open Internet is threatened

The United States has long enjoyed an open and relatively neutral internet. Due to a series of legal decisions, the rules and regulations which enabled it were struck down; a legal vacuum has been left where those foundations once stood. The FCC is proposing a set of rules which, if adopted, would allow ISPs to discriminate against traffic in a "commercially reasonable" way (this is vaguely defined and is basically at will). For instance, they could degrade consumers’ connection to Netflix unless Netflix struck a deal with them. They could slow down access to Skype in the same way or severely degrade access to educational resources from companies they weren’t partnered with. For small startups without the resources to fight traffic discrimination or strike deals with ISPs, net neutrality can be the difference between life and death.

Rather than try and explain the background myself, this article and the John Oliver segment below do a pretty good job.

We’re not the biggest company. We don’t have experience with dealing with Washington politics. We certainly don’t have the time we’d like to devote to this issue. However, every voice makes a difference.

What you can do

No matter who you are or where you are in the world, this issue will affect your future.

Millions have already made their voices known to the FCC and Congress. Instead of calling the FCC, we encourage you to call the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and politely explain why he should urge the FCC to ensure real net neutrality and forbid online discrimination. His office number is (202) 401-3000.

Acknowledgements

All of our efforts advocating on behalf of an open internet have been organized by the Ammori Group. Thank you Marvin and Lavon for your amazing work.

Thank you to Engine, Stripe, the FCC, and many others for organizing a meeting with the Chairman about these issues.

And thank you to all who’ve made their voice heard on this issue, including other education startups such as Codecademy, General Assembly, and OpenCurriculum.

Thanks for your post. CodeCombat's "play first, learn later" approach gets kids gaming long before it occurs to them they might want to learn a little programming. Fundamentally a game played by writing code, the site never feels like code school. Instead, the code works like a magical language, where properly formatted incantations animate the on-screen characters. While many educational games have tried to make learning more fun, this is a game in which the real challenge is to make fun more educational. So while the game could use more educational content, the growing CodeCombat community promises to expand resources for teachers and learners. In the meantime, teachers would do well to check out this site to see an educational game done the right way. https://intellipaat.com/

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When we open-sourced everything a month ago, we were nervous. What if no one contributes?, we worried. We had spent a week writing documentation, automating the developer setup, filing easy issues, paring down the repository, and preparing licenses. We wanted to demonstrate that open source should be the default choice for many startups and games, but if we failed, then we would have done the opposite.

We needn't have worried. The CodeCombat Archmages swarmed the GitHub gates, breached the dev setup bug barricade, and presented a plethora of pull requests. Here are the first month stats:

"Okay, sure, that's a lot of contributors, but are they really helping? Those pull requests are probably tiny changes like centering some div. I bet the CodeCombat team is still doing almost all the real work and the open source thing is just for show."

Not convinced by a list of numbers? Good; I wouldn't be, either. Let's dig in and see how much the Archmages have really contributed. Here are the top five open source contributors with links to their commits:

Bitcoin has arguably one of the innovations that has led to the highest amount of skepticism in a while. The systems, technology, and rules the bitcoin system has have never been unified in such a way ever before, and possibly have never been possible, or at least as feasible, as ever before in history due to limitations in memory, computation, cryptological effectiveness and internet speed. It is important to remember there are two parts to bitcoin the underlying protocol and what is applicable to said protocol. The underlying protocol, which can be understood to be a decentralized consensus network that uses cryptology to authroize transactions, make it unfeasible to compromise the system and allow one with the cryptologic code to have de facto ownship/authority over what is allocated to that key. To summarize what people aren't understanding is that: The bitcoin protocol makes it possible for people to exchange ownership and also have de facto ownership without conceding anything in between. Furthermore, bitcoin is objective or neutral, in that the bitcoin protocol can't cherry pick which transactions to let through and which ones not to, Everything gets processed the same. No one can sieze your funds, counterfiet you funds, forge ownership, or control your funds. This all assuming you are using bitcoins how they are meant to be used and protecting your private keys accordingly, which is another debate, but the fact that such an arrangement is even feasible is something that immediately makes bitcoin groundbreaking. other things to keep in mind

1. He who has the private keys, has the funds. No questions asked. You can't forge funds or delete funds, you can only lose access too funds. All the private keys thrown away aren't exactly deleted, its just noone has access to them. If you were to miraculously guess the private key to the wallets that have been discarded, you would have control over those funds. Unlike cash which can be counterfeited or destroyed.

2. Net neutrality as mentioned above. No single transaction is cherry picked or stopped, all transactions flow as normal whether they be thousands of bitcoins or a handful of satoshis.

3. You and conclusively verify an addresses fund without have access to the funds. this is groundbreaking. You don't have to trust in a third party to audit, or the trustworthiness of the person. It is literally impossible to game or scam the system, and if you manage to (i.e. break the cryptology) ether the funds become worthless, or the network agrees on a new cryptology to use.

essentially bitcoin makes it possible for people to exchange ownership of funds ( or anything once new things get built on top of the bitcoin network) in a conclusive manner without needing anyone else to clear the funds. A huge amount of society's efforts on the economic front have come from deciding who is credit worthy and who isn't, who is trustworthy, protecting assets and liabilties against fraud and cooking the books, and of course accounting for the risks, costs, and labor associated with moving, reconciling and clearing transactions. on top of all that, the consumer as of late has been the one to pay the price. as having gold or massive amounts of dollars is cumbersome, risky, and a cost in an of itself which can require massive amounts of correction, proviing ownership and such, bitcoins quite frankly just work. they cut the middle man and give power no to the people, as some revolutionaries say, but to no one and everybody at the same time. It is like a market-version of democracy, instead of a representative version. no one concedes their decision making, but rather in aggregate decide which paths to take, and since everyone benefits by having nobody have complete control, everyone decides that nobody should have control.